The rise of China has sparked much debate about whether it will be
a status quo power or a spoiler. This article examines China's
compliance with international rules and norms governing doping in
sports. In the 1990s China was at the centre of a series of high profile
doping scandals in the sports world and caused much distress to the
international sports regulatory regime. Has the Chinese Government succeeded in cleaning up its international sports or have Chinese
athletes become more sophisticated at evading detection? This study
concludes that international pressure has prompted the Chinese
Government to escalate efforts to curb doping in sports. It offers a
unique window on China's governance and its compliance with
international rules and norms.

**********

The rise of China has sparked much debate about whether it will be
a status quo power or spoiler in the existing international order. (1)
This article examines China's troubled history with doping in
international sports in order to shed light on China's governance
and compliance with international rules and norms.

Why doping in sports? First, although sports competition, unlike
national defence and military conflict, is not within the realm of high
international politics, it is nonetheless of high stakes for
nation-building and national prestige. (2) National sports have long
been powerful rallying points for many nations, and China is no
exception. For the past century, successive Chinese governments have
linked the promotion of modern sport with China's nation-building
project. (3)

Second, scholars of international norms have noted that countries
are most likely to be sensitive to international norms and pressure when
they care about their international image or reputation. (4) Moreover,
the literature on international integration and national governance has
posited a strong relationship between international integration and
national governance, especially national corruption. (5) Measured in
terms of the degree of integration, few areas or sectors can match
sports competition, even for large countries such as China and the
United States. It is therefore possible to test whether China, a
relatively new but aggressive entrant to world sports competition, has
behaved in line with the predictions of the existing literature.

Success in sports for China has been intertwined with China's
politics. In the Mao era, China was mostly absent from the world of
competitive sports due to a western embargo and its decision to adhere
to the ideology of "friendship first, competition second"
signified by the famous ping-pong diplomacy. (6) This age of innocence
ended quickly in the reform era, especially with the inspiring
performances of the Chinese women's volleyball team and after
Chinese athletes performed well at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics (which
were boycotted by the Soviet Union). (7) While the whole country coveted
international medals and awards as symbols of national strength and
honour, athletes and coaches soon learned that medals brought not only
fame but also monetary payoffs, better careers, and more.

By the 1990s China was at the centre of a series of high-profile
doping scandals in the sports world that caused much distress to
international sports governance. Some of China's most elite
athletes were stripped of their medals in major international
competitions for using performance-enhancing drugs. Embarrassing doping
scandals at the 1994 Asian Games and especially the 1998 World
Championships placed the Chinese sports authorities and the national
leadership on the defensive and provided ammunition for China's
critics. Even more than the widespread counterfeiting in the commercial
world, cheating in the sports world gave rise to the view that China
would seek to win by whatever means, and at the expense of honest and
hardworking athletes.

To salvage its tattered reputation, avoid expulsion from certain
sports and regain the confidence of global society, the Chinese sports
leadership needed to act, and act quickly, to curb the high incidence of
sports doping, especially since China first sought and then won the
right to host the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. What has the Chinese
Government, particularly its sports administration, done to curb the
apparently widespread use of illegal performance-enhancing substances?
Has China succeeded in cleaning up its international sports or have
Chinese athletes and coaches become more sophisticated at evading
detection?

This article introduces evidence that suggests that intense
international pressure has prompted the Chinese Government to escalate
efforts to curb sports doping. By the 2004 Athens Olympics, China's
efforts had apparently worked: unlike the host country Greece and
several other major sports powers, not a single Chinese athlete tested
positive for doping in Athens. Moreover, the Chinese team won 32 gold
medals and placed second in the overall medal rankings for the first
time. (8) In just a few years, China seemed to have succeeded in taming
the scourge of doping as far as major international competitions are
concerned and still increase its prowess as a major sporting power.

China's transformation from a near-pariah in international
sports in the late 1990s to a model performer in Athens raises
intriguing questions about sports doping and these may shed light on the
broader issues of governance and compliance with international rules.

Sports Competition, Governance and the Incentives for Cheating

The reform era has unleashed sports from the shackles of Maoist
puritanism. Sports administrators quickly took advantage of the
reformist atmosphere to seek non-governmental funding to make up for
limited government budget commitments. In 1984, the State Council
announced that corporations and private individuals would be allowed to
sponsor sports teams. (9) Today most of China's sports teams, from
soccer to volleyball, carry the names of their corporate sponsors. As
the Chinese economy has climbed up the ladder of success over the past
quarter century, the amount of money bestowed on China's Olympic
gold medalists and other sports stars has skyrocketed, with top athletes
routinely earning millions in award money and commercial endorsements.
As far as sports are concerned, China has rushed headlong into the age
of the winner-take-all society. (10)

The Pressure to Win

Athletic success brought fame and fortune not just for the athletes
but also financial payoffs and potential upward mobility for officials.
Failure or even underperformance, however, can be unforgiving. At the
1988 Seoul Olympics the Chinese delegation won only five gold medals.
Soon afterwards, Li Menghua, head of the State Sports Commission, had to
resign.

With the Seoul debacle on their minds, China's sports
leadership focused its limited resources on earning medals in
international competitions, especially the Olympics. In 1991, the
national sports administration gave 16 sports "key Olympic
sport" status and thus favourable treatment in funding and other
support. When the previous evaluation system led provincial sports
officials to prioritise performance at the National Games rather than
the Olympics, the national sports administration incorporated
performance at the Olympics into the sports performance evaluation system and re-scheduled the National Games to fall one year after the
Summer Olympics. Beginning in 1997 the National Games have included only
the 16 "key Olympic sports" and traditional Chinese martial
arts. (11) These adjustments realigned the incentives for provincial
sports officials and made them focus on improving performance in
Olympics sports. To a significant extent, the Chinese delegation's
success at the 1992 Barcelona Games and 1996 Atlanta Games reflected the
readjusted institutional incentives for rewarding Olympic performance.
(12)

Governance Reforms and Sports Competition

The national obsession with sporting prowess was magnified among
the localities. Through much of the 1980s and 1990s, the Chinese
Government decentralised economic and institutional reforms. In the
process of these broad reforms, the centre decentralised many sports
organs and devolved much of the governance of sports to the provinces
and municipalities. (13) The decentralisation of sports governance not
only helped stimulate much competition among the localities but also
offered fertile ground for corrupt behaviour such as doping and
match-fixing.

Reforms of the sports administrative apparatus were part of an
overall government rationalisation and streamlining in the 1990s. (14)
In 1994, the State Council ordered the downsizing of the State Sports
Commission to 13 departments/bureaus, with an officially approved staff
size (bianzhi) of 381 for the headquarters, and total employment of over
30,000. (15) In 1998, the top of the sporting apparatus was trimmed
further when the State Sports Commission was merged with the All-China
Sports Federation to become the State General Administration of Sports.
While still answering directly to the State Council, the revamped
administration was further streamlined into nine bureaus, with the
consolidation of four training-competition bureaus and the excision of
the planning bureau. Staff size at headquarters was cut by 53 per cent
to 180. (16)

The streamlining in Beijing was accompanied by the decentralisation
of the sports governance to management centres and local authorities in
the 1990s. The State Sports Commission in 1993 began to permit the
formation of competitive leagues and clubs; commercialisation soon
spread to football (soccer), basketball and a number of other team
sports. To raise the stakes for local sports administrations, the State
Sports Administration abolished a number of permanent national teams,
including the national swimming team, in favour of a system where
athletes stayed with their provincial teams. Under this system, the
athletes stay local but are called up to the national team for training
before international competitions.

Along with autonomy in managing their sports programmes came
responsibility: the careers and fortunes of provincial and local sports
officials as well as those of the teams, team leaders and coaches would
rise and fall with the performance of their athletes, especially at the
National Games and City Games. Head coaches, in particular, were charged
with primary responsibility for team performance. It was well known in
Chinese sports circles that, following poor performances at the National
Games, some provincial sports bureau directors lost their jobs even
before they had returned home. Since the number of medals for each sport
at these games is basically fixed, provincial/municipal teams competing
against each other and seeking to best the others are caught in a
zero-sum situation: if team A wins more medals, it invariably means that
the other teams win fewer. Given the high-powered incentives facing the
local teams and the relatively light policing of these domestic
competitions for doping and other problems, the domestic competitions
have been famous for various forms of corrupt behaviour, including
doping, match-fixing, and so on.

Several sports, including weight-lifting, swimming and cycling have
been especially prone to doping violations among the provincial teams.
The decentralisation of swimming, for example, gave much more discretion
to provincial team coaches over athletes' training and offered
opportunity for them to adopt tactics to thwart anti-doping inspections,
even out-of-competition tests. It was likely that doping in the early
1990s was organised and managed not by individual or groups of athletes,
but their coaches and doctors with the tacit approval of team officials.
In the case of the 1998 World Swimming Championships in Perth,
Australia, four Chinese swimmers tested positive for banned diuretics
that are commonly used to mask the use of steroids. All four came from
Shanghai, then under coach Zhou Ming, a protege of the disgraced coach
Chen Yunpeng. (17)

As long as Chinese athletes brought home the medals without causing
embarrassment to the country, central sports authorities appear to have
condoned such local or team behaviour and considered the rapid
performance improvement made possible by the introduction of better
training regimes and "sports medicine" an indication of
progress in combining science with sports. After all, for some sports
officials as well as athletes (and not just in China), the line between
doping and sports medicine is very fine. Use of erythropoietin (EPO),
for example, appears to have been a well known technique for boosting
performance (and not just among Chinese athletes) until it was
rigorously tested at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, causing the Chinese
delegation to undergo a major purge shortly before departing for Sydney.
Even central sports officials are implicated to the extent that they
might have been aware of the doping problems but preferred not to raise
them, and perhaps even connived in them. In the words of Jinxia Dong,
"it was the hypocrisy, deceit and dishonesty of some sports
officials that provided a climate in which drug-taking could
survive". (18)

Even when anti-doping efforts were stepped up, as discussed below,
several provincial teams were still found to have engaged in collective
doping behaviour in recent years in preparation for the National Games.
Between November 2003 and September 2004, three members of the Liaoning
provincial weightlifting team tested positive for banned substances, and
drugs were found on the premises of the team's training grounds,
prompting a round of heavy fines for the athletes, and a one-year
competition ban for the entire Liaoning weightlifting team. (19) In
October 2004, the Ningxia provincial weightlifting team also saw three
positive tests, and was given a one-year competition ban. These
high-profile team doping incidents prompted the anti-doping authorities
to publish a lengthy commentary about the dangers and illegality of
doping. (20) But months later and shortly before the Tenth National
Games (2005) were to convene, the Chinese Olympic Committee handed
two-year bans to 12 weightlifters of the Hubei provincial women's
weightlifting team and banned their coaches for life. The Hubei
provincial weightlifting teams, both men's and women's, were
disqualified from the Tenth National Games and barred from competition
for one year. (21)

The Athletes' (and Coaches') Calculus

Unlike in most Western countries, where athletes typically have
various life options beyond athletics, competitive Chinese athletes
frequently do not have such choices. Parents who want their children to
become athletes on national teams often take them to sports schools at a
very early age. Admissions to such schools that feed the sports
hierarchy are competitive from the very beginning. Once accepted into
the system, students must climb the hierarchy from elementary/middle
school teams through high school teams, amateur teams, magnet or key
amateur sports schools, and professional provincial-level teams. (22)
Only the most talented are able to hopscotch through the process and
enter training academies, join provincial-level teams and thus stand the
chance of being selected to join the national teams.

A tiny number reach the very top of their fields and stand to reap
the fame and fortune that come to Olympic medalists. The outlook for
most athletes in the system is far from glorious. A budding athlete is
likely to spend the bulk of his or her time and energy on training and
competition, and thus can hardly enjoy a regular elementary and
secondary education let alone succeed in China's highly competitive
college entrance exams. Many retired athletes, with few marketable
skills, have struggled to make ends meet. (23) Only in recent years have
the most successful Chinese athletes, especially Olympic medalists, been
awarded entrance to top universities. In athletics, the winner does
indeed take all.

Given the large stakes, and how even a small boost in performance
can mean the difference between medalling and not medalling or between
being the top winner or an also-run, the temptation for athletes and
their coaches to cheat can be especially hard to resist. In many ways,
such calculations are not unique to Chinese athletes; the list of
world-famous athletes later found to have cheated is a long one,
including American former track star Marion Jones, winner of five medals
in the 2000 Olympics; the Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson, the 1988
Olympic gold medalist in the 100 metres; Justin Gatlin, the 2004 Olympic
gold medalist in the 100 metres; and Floyd Landis, the 2006 Tour de
France winner. (24) The challenge for regulators is to increase the
probability of catching the cheaters and raise the costs of doping in
terms of bans and fines against offenders in order to deter athletes and
coaches from engaging in doping behaviour. (25)

The Nascent Anti-doping Infrastructure

Yet anti-doping work was virtually nonexistent in China for much of
the 1980s. There was an anything-goes atmosphere at that time. As China
embarked on its reform and modernisation programme, it was considered
desirable to marry modern science, as embodied in training regimes and
performance-enhancing drugs, with sports to boost athletic performance.

It was not until around 1987 that the State Sports Commission began
formally to take up doping as a major issue in the context of growing
domestic and international concern about doping in Olympic sports. (26)
In 1989, the Commission issued its first anti-doping regulation:
"Provisional Regulations on Doping Control in National Sports
Events." (27) The following year, in connection with the 1990 Asian
Games in Beijing, the State Sports Commission followed up with its
"Notice on Severely Prohibiting Illegal Substances" which
emphasised a tripartite anti-doping policy of "strict prohibition,
strict examination, and strict punishment", or the sanyan (yanling
jinzhi, yange jiancha, yanli chufa), which quickly became the shorthand
used to describe the official anti-doping policy. (28)

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[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

In line with the issuance of anti-doping regulations, China began
to build drug-testing facilities that met the standards set forth by the
International Olympic Committee. These facilities initially conducted
only a small number of tests. In 1990, for example, only 165 tests were
performed and three of these (1.8 per cent) were positive. (29) In light
of the large number of Chinese athletes, it is evident that the
drug-testing laboratory was then not adequately funded and staffed to
effectively carry out anti-doping work nationwide. In some sense, the
small number of tests, mostly conducted at the national level, served to
highlight the low probability of being caught. Thus the 1993 spike in
the number and percentage of positive tests (see Figure 3) came in the
year after the Anti-Doping Commission was established and the number of
tests rose from 938 in 1992 to 1,347 in 1993. Meanwhile, the percentage
of positive tests suggests that doping had become entrenched in Chinese
sports at that time.

National Reputation at Risk: The Doping Crisis

With all the pressures to win and the light policing of doping in
sports, it is hardly surprising that some Chinese athletes use
performance-enhancing substances to quickly improve their performance.
In doing so, they attract admiration as well as suspicion. At a time of
growing international attention to doping, it would not take long before
some of these athletes would get caught. In the Chinese case, however,
the numbers were large and China's own reputation and prestige were
soon at stake.

This was the case in swimming, in which China's women swimmers
rose spectacularly onto the world stage and became a dominant force in
the early 1990s. They won much glory for China at the 1992 Summer
Olympics at Barcelona and then dominated the VII World Aquatic
Championships in Rome in September 1994, winning 12 of 16 gold medals.
Then, right before the Asian Games in Hiroshima in October 1994, the
Chinese swimmers were given surprise drug tests by the Federation
Internationale de Natation (FINA), the world's swimming governing
body. In all, 11 Chinese athletes, including 7 swimmers (3 of whom were
world champions), tested positive for a banned anabolic steroid known as
dihydrotestosterone (DHT). They were stripped of their medals and banned
from competition for two years. At that time, Chinese swimmers then
accounted for 13 of 22 positive drug tests since the 1972 Olympics. (30)

Doping reared its ugly head again in 1998 when four Chinese
swimmers were caught using steroids and other drugs to mask banned
substances at the world championships in Perth, Australia. All four were
suspended from international competitions for two years. On top of the
four swimmers, another female swimmer, Yuan Yuan, was caught entering
Australia with enough human growth hormone for the entire swimming team,
and was handed a four-year ban from international competition. (31) Her
coach, Zhou Zhewen, received an unprecedented fifteen-year ban from
international competition. This time the Chinese swimming team ended up
winning only three gold medals, one silver and two bronzes, a far cry
from their performance in Rome in 1994.

The unprecedented number of positive tests at the 1994 Asian Games
confirmed growing international suspicion about widespread drug use by
Chinese athletes, especially swimmers, and cast a dark shadow over the
Chinese swimming team's meteoric rise. Because the athletes needed
assistance to gain access to substances such as DHT, it was clear that
the athletes testing positive did not simply take these substances on
their own but had help from their coaches and trainers. (32) To many,
such collusion was no surprise because the Chinese swimming team had in
the 1980s received assistance from East Germany, which had engaged in a
state doping programme. (33)

The question is how systematic doping had become in China. Jinxia
Dong, a former athlete and the author of Women, Sport, and Society in
Modern China, wrote: "It has become dreadfully clear in the last
few years that East German coaches used drugs to improve the performance
of their athletes in many sports as a matter of course, and it is only
reasonable to assume that they took these practices with them to China.
(34) For Dong, Chinese coaches and athletes were quick learners and
many, amid intense pressure to win, had eagerly embraced
performance-enhancing drugs by the 1990s. Another recent study also
concluded that China did not have a systematic state-run doping
programme. (35)

Confronted with the doping scandals at the 1994 Asian Games,
Chinese foreign ministry and sports officials put on a brave face and
sought to allay suspicions of a national or state-sponsored doping
programme. They insisted that the doping cases were the results of
"misguided individuals" and even accused Japanese testers at
the games of deliberately embarrassing the Chinese team so the Japanese
team could rank ahead of China in the medal count. (36)

Yet something had to be done to repair China's battered
reputation amid growing international criticism and head off the growing
chorus for sanctions against China. Many foreign coaches and athletes,
especially those from the major aquatic powers, were angry at the
Chinese swimmers using banned performance-enhancing substances and
robbing them of their medal chances and much more. In February 1995, the
major aquatic powers, including Australia, Canada and the United States,
worked together to ban China from the Pan Pacific Championships to be
held in August 1995 in Atlanta. (37) At the same time, FINA as well as
the international Olympic movement was also under tremendous pressure to
protect the reputation of international sports and the interests of
rule-abiding athletes. Indeed, international anger against doping by
Chinese athletes gave major impetus to the global drive against doping.
Amid the uproar, the Olympic Movement Anti-doping Code was adopted and
the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) was established in 1999.

Over time, the cost of doping in sports to China's
international prestige became larger and larger. For Chinese national
leaders aspiring to recast China's role as a responsible global
power, the large number of Chinese athletes being caught at
international events became a major liability. Added to a long list of
complaints about Chinese behaviour ranging from arms proliferation to
intellectual piracy, rampant doping in high-visibility international
sports, especially the Olympics, seriously hurt China's image
without producing any tangible benefit. Without taking serious efforts
to tackle the doping crisis, China risked being ostracised in the
international sports community, let alone become the host for the
Olympics. China would lose both "face" and glory if its
leaders failed to act decisively to deal with the doping crisis
afflicting its athletes, especially women swimmers.

Chinese Responses to the Doping Crisis

Following the debacle at the 1994 Asian Games and the further
humiliation at the 1998 World Championships, Chinese sports authorities,
often acting in cooperation with or in response to international sport
organisations, have undertaken a range of measures to prevent a
recurrence of such national embarrassments. These measures included the
strengthening of anti-doping laws and regulations, funding for enhanced
testing facilities and capabilities, intensified testing and punishment,
as well as reforms in sports governance.

Punishment

Right after the 1994 Asian Games, Chinese sports authorities acted
quickly. Besides following FINA rules to impose competition suspensions
on athletes who had tested positive for banned substances, they promptly
retired Chen Yunpeng, the swimming team's coach credited for
bringing the Chinese team onto the international stage. (38) Five more
swimming coaches were banned from competitions. (39) By 1998, the system
of punishment for offending athletes and coaches had become standard. As
soon as news of the Yuan Yuan and Zhou Zhewen cases broke, the Chinese
Swimming Association prohibited them from participating in the World
Championships.

After the 1998 World Championships, China's sports leadership
showed their determination to avoid any further embarrassment by
adopting a take-no-prisoners approach. Under new rules, swimmers who
tested positive for steroids would be banned from competition for life,
including first-time offenders. This was a tougher stance than that of
FINA, which imposed a four-year suspension for a first offence and
lifetime suspension for a second violation. (40) Coaches, doctors and
trainers were to take part in anti-doping courses and the anti-doping
commission would hand out anti-doping pamphlets to athletes before all
events.

With ever more rigorous international testing, the Chinese sports
authorities were keen to make use of the latest technologies to prevent
Chinese athletes from being caught for testing positive abroad. Much
emphasis was given to catching doping athletes at home. The 2000
Olympics in Sydney, for example, would be the first Olympics to test
blood samples for EPO. In the run-up to the Sydney Olympics, China
abruptly dropped 40 athletes and officials from its delegation,
including 14 track and field athletes, four swimmers, two canoeists and
seven rowers who failed last-minute blood tests. (41) The purge of so
many athletes, especially those who had failed blood tests, constituted
prima facie evidence of substantial EPO use among Chinese athletes.
Nonetheless, because of the purge, no Chinese athlete tested positive at
the 2000 Olympics.

Enhanced Testing Capabilities

As Figure 1 of the total number of tests conducted indicates, China
steadily raised the number of doping tests throughout the 1990s.
Moreover, Figure 2 giving the breakdown of doping tests points to a
significant increase in the percentage of tests conducted
out-of-competition. These efforts to conduct more tests and spread them
throughout the year have had a measurable deterrence effect. Notably,
the percentage of tests turning up positive has generally been on the
decline since the early 1990s.

Yet the repeated doping scandals up to the year 2000 suggest that
the increased testing efforts had had a limited effect on reducing the
incidence of doping during that time span. In the early 1990s this was
probably because the testing capability was still modest and most tests
were conducted incompetition. Indeed, the limited testing capability
probably had the perverse effect of encouraging athletes and coaches in
certain sports, such as swimming, to work around the national doping
testing schedules to avoid detection during sporting events. Later, it
appeared that the cheating athletes and coaches were seeking to beat the
system by staying one step ahead, going from DHT in 1994 to EPO in 2000.

Because Chinese athletes were being caught en masse in
international sports events, however, the Chinese anti-doping
establishment was able to secure more government funding and conduct
more tests, and more testing out-of-competition. In out-of-competition
testing, anti-doping personnel visit athletes at their homes or training
academies and conduct tests, often unannounced. Because testers must
travel out to the provinces to find these athletes, the cost of each
out-of-competition test is much higher than testing during competition.
(42)

By the year 2000, the Chinese Anti-doping Commission had enjoyed a
marked improvement in resources as well as the highest political support
for its work. The number of tests conducted each year increased to more
than 3,000 over the 1997 to 2000 period while the percentage of these
tests conducted out of competition reached between 50 and 60 per cent.
The escalation of doping test efforts in the latter half of the 1990s
helped to bring down the percentage of positive tests to below 0.5 per
cent.

In the face of the intensified anti-doping testing regime, some
athletes and quite likely some teams apparently turned their attention
to more sophisticated blood-based boosts that were not detectable with
conventional urine tests. When the Sydney Olympics announced that
systematic blood tests would be conducted, however, the Chinese sports
establishment reacted quickly to avoid new embarrassments. After
conducting blood tests on its own, the Chinese sports leadership
withdrew 40 members from its delegation right before the Chinese
delegation headed for Sydney.

In the early 2000s, the Chinese anti-doping facilities further
increased the number of doping tests to around 5,000 each year. The
escalating efforts to enhance detection coupled with life-time bans for
even first-time offenders finally brought the scourge of doping under
control, at least for China's Olympic delegation. At the 2004
Olympics in Athens, the Chinese delegation was again clean; this time no
purge was needed before the delegation headed for Athens.

Strengthening Anti-Doping Institutions and Programmes

The escalation of doping tests has rested on an evolving regulatory
framework that responds to and reflects the rules and norms of
international sports. The PRC Sports Law, enacted in 1995 by the
National People's Congress, made general statements against illegal
substances and cheating and set the framework for implementing
regulations. (43) Soon the web of anti-doping regulations began to
address more specific, sophisticated and technical issues in anti-doping
work, such as out-of-competition testing, punitive measures, management
of testing personnel, EPO use, etc. (44) Under this framework, over 30
anti-doping laws, directives and regulations have been issued to
regulate drug testing and promote fair play. (45)

Developments since the Sydney Olympics are especially noteworthy.
In an effort to rebuild international confidence in China's sports
and Chinese anti-doping initiatives, the Chinese anti-doping authorities
increased cooperation with the WADA and other national anti-doping
bodies. In 2003, China became one of the first signatories to
WADA's Copenhagen Declaration, a non-binding agreement on
compliance with WADA standards and regulations. (46) The Chinese
Government quickly followed up by issuing a set of Anti-Doping
Regulations, which formally came into effect on 1 March 2004, in time to
augment the authority and policing powers of the Chinese anti-doping
authorities ahead of the 2004 Summer Olympics. The Regulations include
specific provisions for punitive measures against team officials,
personnel and government officials who interfere with anti-doping work.
Punishments range from two to four years' suspension from sports
work to a lifetime ban for egregious violations as well as criminal
liability.

These legal documents have helped to empower the Chinese
Anti-doping Commission (and the Doping Control Centre), which came into
being in 1992 under the auspices of the National Sports Commission and
the Chinese Olympic Committee, to successfully increase the number of
doping tests conducted each year. In certain sports, especially
swimming, international organisations such as FINA and WADA have played
a major role in testing and spurring domestic facilities to increase
their testing capability. For the Tenth National Games held in fall
2005, for example, 1,600 urine tests were carried out, 20 per cent more
than at the 9th Games in 2001. (47) Moreover, 26 athletes were caught
for testing positive for out-of-competition doping tests and banned from
participation in the Games (compared with 17 for all of 2004). (48)
Armed with the Anti-Doping Regulations, the Chinese Anti-Doping
Commission and the China Doping Control Centre have hired more personnel
and upgraded facilities in preparation for the 2008 Olympics. (49) It
plans to conduct 4,500 doping tests during the 2008 Olympics, compared
with 3,667 at the 2004 Athens Games and 2,758 at the 2000 Sydney Games.
WADA officials will serve as independent observers. (50)

Reforms in Sports Governance

Having discussed the initiatives for building and strengthening
anti-doping institutions, facilities and enforcement, the efforts to
tighten supervision of team management at the national level should also
be mentioned. These efforts paralleled institutional readjustments in
various other government administrations to augment hierarchical
control. (51)

As noted earlier, the decentralising reforms in the governance
structure of sports administration stimulated domestic competition but
also made the world of domestic sports in China more unruly. The
national sports leadership gradually became keenly aware of the problems
plaguing China's domestic competition and has in time adopted
measures to prevent spillage of the domestic problems beyond
China's borders. After the Ninth National Games (2001), for
example, the Chinese Swimming Team chose not to invite several swimmers
that had shined brightly at these Games to join the national team,
apparently knowing that these athletes would not pass doping tests for
international competition. (52) Needless to say, all athletes invited to
join the national team are rigorously tested before they are allowed to
participate in international competitions.

To mitigate the adverse effects of decentralisation, the national
leadership has adjusted the structure of sports governance in favour of
more central direction and accountability. In swimming, the National
Swimming Association was renamed the China Swimming Association. Among
the reforms introduced were increased central supervision of provincial
teams, athletes and coaches, the representation of provincial swimming
board directors on the national-level board and the establishment of a
National Swimming Control Centre governed by the Competitive Sports
Bureau of the State General Administration of Sports. (53) The reforms
also demanded greater accountability from provincial sports officials
under a zero tolerance policy.

Case Study: The National Swimming Team 1992-2004

Swimming was one of the key areas targeted by the Chinese sports
establishment for Olympic medals beginning in the early 1980s. By the
early 1990s, Chinese swimming, especially women's swimming, had
achieved a meteoric rise. The suddenness and scale of China's rise
as a major swimming power quickly raised suspicions of systematic
doping, as had occurred in East Germany. As a result, Chinese swimmers
have become major targets of doping tests both domestically and by FINA.
As of 2004, more than one sixth of all doping tests in China were on
swimmers. Since the mid-1990s, between 60 and 71 per cent of the doping
tests on Chinese swimmers has been conducted out-of-competition.

The organisation of swimming is more federalised than other sports
but the emphasis on central direction coupled with a heavy emphasis on
testing have helped to ensure that Chinese swimmers participate in
international competition, having already been tested. With increased
domestic and international testing on Chinese swimmers, tougher
penalties against athletes and their coaches, the number of the Chinese
national swimming team members testing positive has stayed low after the
major spikes in 1994 and 1998. The results speak for themselves. Between
2001 and 2004, Chinese swimmers tested positive only four times from
2001 to 2004, with none in 2002 and 2004.

Does the decline in the number of Chinese swimmers testing positive
for doping indicate that China has tamed the scourge of doping in
swimming? Not exactly. For it is also possible that Chinese athletes had
become more sophisticated at evading detection. As mentioned earlier,
the substances for which Chinese swimmers tested positive changed from
DHT in 1994, to EPO in 2000. Indeed, Chinese participants at a seminar
where an earlier draft of this article was presented were quick to raise
this possibility.

It is only when the data on doping tests and the number of medals
won is combined that we can be sure of our inference. In terms of the
number of medals won, the time-series data point to a simple story. In
the early 1990s, the Chinese swimming team was winning a large and
indeed dominant number of gold medals in international competition,
presumably with the aid of "sports medicine". As both the
number of doping tests and penalties for doping escalated, the number of
gold medals won by Chinese swimmers plummeted. At the 2004 Athens
Olympics, the entire Chinese swimming team garnered only one gold medal.

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

We can safely assume that Chinese swimmers have not become less
talented over time. Indeed, as China's economic strengths have
risen, Chinese swimmers have enjoyed better material support and
training conditions and are thus expected to perform better than before.
In view of these two facts, the only inference we can make about
China's declining medal count in international swimming
competitions is that the tough international and domestic anti-doping
regime has resulted in the exclusion of swimmers who did well by relying
on banned performing-enhancing drugs.

To be sure, one might easily wonder whether Chinese coaches and
athletes have truly cleaned up or have become more sophisticated at
evading detection in international competition. In the final analysis,
the possibility that some Chinese athletes are still using
performance-enhancing substances and are not detected cannot be ruled
out. Some have publicly speculated that some Chinese are still working
hard to beat the current system. For example, John Leonard, head of the
American Swimming Coaches Association, and others suspect that China has
a secret programme to genetically enhance the performance of talented
children--about 50 swimmers--before unleashing them for the Beijing
Olympics. (54) One Chinese coach has adamantly denied such rumours. (55)
Nonetheless, the widespread use of banned substances among young
athlete-students in China and the penchant of the Chinese media to refer
to "secret weapons" suggest other possibilities. (56) In
sports doping, as in various forms of corruption, there is a constant
cat-and-mouse game between cheaters and regulators.

Nonetheless, the precipitous fall in the number of swimming medals
won by the Chinese swimming delegation in international competitions
suggests that, even if there were such athletes, their presence is not
enough to substantially alter the performance of the Chinese swimming
delegation. It thus appears that the tough international and domestic
doping tests and penalties have helped restore the integrity of
China's swimming performance in international competition.

Discussion and Implications

The literature on international norms and domestic governance
posits that a country which is deeply integrated into the international
system and cares about its international reputation is more likely to
alter its behaviour to comply with international norms than one that is
less deeply integrated and/or callous about what others think of it.
(57) When a country's behaviour diverges from that prescribed by
international rules, other countries are more likely to successfully
exert pressure and it is also more likely to feel the pressure because
of the integration.

Few sectors are as globalised and integrated as Olympic sports.
While the rules and norms for individual sports are constantly subject
to negotiation, once they are in the books, the athletes, coaches and
national delegations have no choice but to play by the book or risk
disqualification and expulsion. The case of anti-doping falls under the
same rubric.

By the mid-1990s, China had become the fastest rising sports power
with Olympian ambitions and yet many of the Chinese athletes, especially
in certain sports such as swimming, were apparently "rogue"
players who, for several years, brought home gold by "marrying
science with sports". After substantial numbers of Chinese athletes
tested positive at the 1994 Asian Games, however, the cost of continuing
such rogue behaviour to China's reputation rose dramatically.
Because the international Olympic movement tightened its rules and
enforcement on doping, there was little benefit for the Chinese
delegation in continuing along the present path. When some Chinese
coaches/athletes sought to beat the system by switching to the use of
EPO, they brought further humiliation to their homeland. This route came
to a quick end when the Sydney Olympics introduced systematic tests for
EPO.

Ultimately China's national leaders, with their Olympian
aspirations, could not afford to risk further international
embarrassment and, in the case of the swimming team, even expulsion. To
avoid being ostracised and to salvage China's reputation,
China's leaders have mobilised and reformed the national sports
apparatus and built the facilities needed to give anti-doping top
priority. China has also cooperated closely with FINA and WADA and
allowed WADA to conduct extensive and out-of-competition tests on
Chinese swimmers, with hardly any controversy over whether such tests
constitute an infringement of national sovereignty.

It is instructive to contrast Chinese behaviour of the early 1990s
with that of the early 2000s. In the 1990s, China's sporting
behaviour, especially in swimming, distressed the international sports
regulatory regime and was eventually a major cause for the establishment
of WADA. The Chinese media was told to hush up when Chinese athletes
failed doping tests.

By the turn of the century China had become a model sports power,
carefully screening its own athletes for banned performance-enhancing
substances before allowing them to compete internationally. The Chinese
media now competes to report on doping cases, such as that of star
distance runner Sun Yingjie, thus helping to convey the
authorities' zero-tolerance attitude toward doping. (58) It was
thus striking to see Dick Pound, the head of the World Anti-Doping
Agency, in Beijing praising China for its assistance in US raids on
illegal labs and giving ringing endorsements of China's new
anti-doping measures in preparation for the 2008 Olympics. According to Pound, "China is in the vanguard of this (fight against
doping)." (59)

A similar transformation has occurred in China's aviation
industry. In the 1990s, China had one of the worst passenger aviation
safety records, with a string of air disasters that tarnished
China's international image and could have prompted the Americans
to restrict Chinese flights to the US. In 2002, the Chinese leadership
replaced the top aviation regulator with Yang Yuanyuan to make safety
first. Under Yang, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) was
eager for foreign assistance. It rewrote China's aviation
regulations with help from Boeing and the US Federal Aviation
Administration. It insisted on rigorous safety compliance by companies
and pilots. It was also willing to allow the International Air Transport
Association (IATA) specialists to audit Chinese airlines and release
their findings. These measures have helped the Chinese aviation industry
become a "global leader in air safety" with "the best
safety performance in the world" between 2004 and 2007. (60)

Yet in most other policy areas, such as protection of intellectual
property rights or environmental protection, international pressure has
so far been less focused than in the case of sports doping, and the
adoption of international rules and norms more selective. Instead,
compromise and negotiation have tended to carry the day and policy
implementation has tended to be weakened by regulatory fragmentation and
local protectionism. (61) Yet the international environment for domestic
regulation can change dramatically. In 2007, for example, there was
rising international concern about the quality of Chinese exports, and
large quantities of Chinese food and other products were being recalled
or rejected. In response, Chinese regulators began to pay attention and
take more aggressive action to ensure the quality of Chinese exports.
The Chinese experiences with sport doping in international competition
and with aviation safety suggest that the aggressive action in ensuring
export product quality has some effect. Yet the interests involved in
exports are more diverse and fragmented. It remains to be seen whether
the central regulators can develop an effective export quality regime
that can be sustained over the long term.

In this context, the evolution of anti-doping in China is not only
fascinating in its own right but has implications for designing reforms
in other areas. Due to the myriad domestic interests that impinge on
national policymaking and implementation, it may be useful for reformers
to tie up Ulysses in order that it would not be drawn to the sirens of
parochial interests. To some extent, China's commitments to the
terms of its entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) have allowed
Chinese policymakers to push through reforms that would have taken far
longer to implement had China remained outside the WTO. China's
ongoing initiatives to allow foreign financial institutions to take up
stakes in major state banks are another effort to lock in and ratchet up
ongoing reforms. Even in anti-corruption, it appears that some Chinese
leaders hope that the signing of the United Nations Convention against
Corruption would help China gain some traction in bringing fugitives
back to China and thus lend some support to domestic anti-corruption
initiatives.

Conclusions

After China was welcomed back into the community of international
sports, particularly the Olympic movement, its rapid ascent in sports
marred by the large number of Chinese athletes testing positive for
banned performance-enhancing substances has challenged the capacity of
the international anti-doping regime. In about a decade's time,
both the international anti-doping regime (as a key element of the
international Olympic movement) and Chinese sports governance have had
to adapt to each other and each has been transformed in the process.

Internationally, while Chinese sporting behaviour was not the sole
factor, the aggressive behaviour of Chinese athletes in certain areas,
especially swimming, was an obvious factor prompting efforts to
strengthen the international anti doping regime, the establishment of
WADA and, more concretely, greater investments in more sophisticated
doping test techniques and capabilities.

Within China, the authorities initially took a defensive approach
towards doping and tended to dismiss positive cases as cheating by
isolated individuals. In the aftermath of a string of major and highly
embarrassing doping scandals in the 1990s, however, and with growing
international pressure on China, the Chinese sports authorities
recognised the need to comply with international rules on doping, and
importantly for salvaging China's reputation, to prevent doping
Chinese athletes from participating in international competition in the
first place. Consequently, the Chinese sports authorities have taken a
multipronged approach to combat doping in sports, adopting laws and
regulations, establishing the China Anti-Doping Commission,
reconfiguring the oversight of local teams and conducting frequent
doping tests, often in collaboration with WADA.

With the adoption of all these measures, it appears China has made
real progress in combating doping in international sports competition.
Whereas droves of Chinese athletes tested positive for illegal
substances in the 1990s, China's large delegation to the 2004
Athens Olympics had no positive tests. The tough stance has reduced
China's chances for winning medals in certain events, especially
swimming, but has allowed China to build a reputation as an
international leader in anti-doping.

The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers, John J. MacAloon
and Yue Qiao as well as seminar participants at the East Asian
Institute, the Workshop on East Asia at the University of Chicago and
the Institute of Social Development and Public Policy at Beijing Normal
University for helpful comments.

(2) For an indication of the stakes involved, see Susan Brownell,
"Challenged America: China and America--Women and Sport, Past,
Present and Future", International Journal of the History of Sport
22, no. 6 (Nov. 2005): 1173-93. From the perspective of China's
leading official in the Olympic movement, see Liang Lijuan, He Zhenliang
and China's Olympic Dream, translated by Susan Brownell (Beijing:
Foreign Languages Press, 2007).

(3) Andrew D. Morris, Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and
Physical Culture in Republic of China (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2004); Susan Brownell, Training the Body
for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People's Republic of
China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

(12) For more discussion about the focus on elite sports, see Fan
Hong, Ping Wu and Huan Xiong, "Beijing Ambitions: An Analysis of
the Chinese Elite Sports System and its Olympic Strategy for the 2008
Olympic Games", International Journal of the History of Sport 22,
no. 4 (July 2005): 510-29.

(16) State Council Release No. 52, 1998, "Guowuyuan
bangongting guanyu yinfa guojia tiyu zongju zhineng peizhi neishe jigou
he renyuan bianzhi guiding de tongzhi (State Council on the Distribution
of the Notice of the Responsibilities, Internal Structure, and Approved
Staff Size of the State General Administration of Sports)", 16 June
1998 [13 May 2005].

(17) Tim Healy and David Hsieh, "Slippery When Wet: New
Evidence that Chinese Swimmers Are Systematically Using Drugs",
Asiaweek, 30 Jan. 1998 at <http://www.
asiaweek.com/asiaweek/98/0130/nat7.html> [12 May 2005].

(22) "Woguo jingji tiyu fazhan zhong 'Jichu da ze to jian
gao' lilun de sibian (Considerations and Discussions on the Theory
of 'High Top on a Large Base' for the Development of Chinese
Competitive Sports)", Tiyu (Sports), Dec. 2001, pp. 2-3.

(25) Allen Sanderson suggests that the various anti-doping
regulations and ever lengthening list of banned substances are simply
arbitrary lines for judging an ever-changing notion of standards,
consistency and equality in sports competition. See Allen Sanderson,
"The Many Dimensions of Competitive Balance", Journal of
Sports Economics 3, no. 2 (May 2002): 224. For more complex and
mathematically-driven formulas for calculating the incentives for
corruption and doping in sports, see Wolfgang Maennig, "On the
Economics of Doping and Corruption in International Sports",
Journal of Sports Economics 3, no. 1 (Feb. 2002): 61-89; and Alex
Berentsen, "The Economics of Doping", European Journal of
Political Economy 18 (2002): 109-27.

(26) For reports on doping and other forms of cheating in Chinese
sports in the 1980s, see Zhao Yu, Qiangguo meng. Zhongguo tiyu de neimu
(The Dream of a Strong Country: Inside Chinese Sports) (Beijing: Zuojia
chubanshe, 1988). Zhao has written a series of chronicles of Chinese
sports, including a dissection of the Chinese team's
underperformance at the Seoul Olympics and a volume on the "Ma
Family Army".

(32) In certain cases, the athletes were probably unaware that they
had been given the banned substances.

(33) Healy and Hsieh, "Slippery When Wet". On Doping in
East Germany, see Werner Franke and Brigitte Berendonk, "Hormonal
Doping and Androgenization of Athletes: A Secret Program of the German
Democratic Republic Government", Clinical Chemistry 43 (1997):
1262-79.

(42) While the anti-doping commission does not release budget
figures or the costs of testing procedures, a World Anti-Doping Agency
report (2001) suggests that the average cost of a urine and blood test
ranged from US$225 to $450. Wolfgang Maennig, "On the Economics of
Doping and Corruption in International Sports", Journal of Sports
Economics 3, no. 1 (Feb. 2002): 65.

(47) Those caught included athletes who submitted positive urine
tests as well as those who skipped regular out-of-competition testing.
Two skips is counted as a positive test, punishable by a competition ban
lasting at least two years. "China Reports Catching 26 Athletes for
Doping Offences This Year Amid Tougher Enforcement", Associated
Press, 12 Sept. 2005.

(57) Risse and Sikkink, "The Socialization of International
Human Rights"; Sandholtz and Gray, "International Integration
and National Corruption".

(58) At the National Games held in 2005, Sun was stripped of her
silver medal in the women's 10,000 metres for failing a doping
test. "Marathon Winner Sun Yingjie Fails Doping Test", Xinhua,
21 Oct. 2005 at <http://news.xinhuan, "International Integration
and National Corruption",
et.com/english/2005-10/21/content_3661403. htm> [22 Oct. 2005].

Dali Yang (eaiyd@nus.edu.sg) is Director of and Professor at the
East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore. He has a PhD in
politics from Princeton University. His main research focus is Chinese
political institutions and political economy.

Alan Leung (alan.leung@abraxascorp.com) is an Asia Analyst at
Abraxas Corporation, a risk mitigation and technology firm. He received
his MA in International Relations and a Bachelor of Arts in Political
Science, both from the University of Chicago in 2006.